I think to call C# a really well-designed language is a bit of an overstatement. As far as I'm concerned (and I like both Java and C# for what they are) it is just Java with a little better support for value types. They frankly got it wrong with exceptions (as you mentioned). They got it wrong in how they handle "null" (as you mentioned). They got it wrong wrt to volatile (as you mentioned). It really is only a marginal, at best, improvement (and that is even debatable) over Java. I really can't see much real advantage of C# over Java for most cases. Java tends to push as much as possible to libraries/JDK whereas C# tends to incorporate new language features more often, but, I really don't see that one is necessarily that much better or worse than the other. I prefer Java exception handling over C# exception handling, but, I like the Rust way of error/alternative handling even better. I think Rust is getting A LOT Of things right, but, there is definitely room for improvement and the comments by the OP can help inform the discussion (even if they do, at first reading, come off a little snide or combative).